count2infinity wrote:you talking secondary or elementary education? I think that they need to have a much larger division between the two. I was a secondary education major and all but one of my education classes were a majority of elementary ed majors. I understand that it's important for those at the secondary level to know how young minds work, but they need to become an expert in a particular material. I like your plan for elementary ed majors, MWB, but not for secondary ed.

I was focused on the El Ed group. You're right, the more specific the area you teach, the more depth you need in that material. Although I think they could probably do a better job of how they teach secondary teachers to reach students. The base education classes for el Ed, middle school, and secondary should all be different.

Have the changes to the annual benchmarks for proficiency being made in Virginia been discussed in here?

My understanding from having read a couple of articles is that they're sort of discarding the misguided attempt at achievement gap elimination contained in NCLB in favor of having different benchmark metrics for a bunch of different subgroups. The article I quickly pulled up shows those benchmarks as being:

I feel like eliminating the gaps is a good thing but my God the way they have these different percents and how specific it is to ethnic groups shows again the mark has been missed... There's just no cure all and it seems like the politicians thinks there is and just thinks they haven't found it yet. I suppose they are getting screamed at to hold education accountable and their easy answer is high stakes testing. Blah.

Honestly "inclusion" is killing a lot of possible momentum to grow readers. I understand the principal behind it however it is impossible to give the learning support students what they need while catering to the needs of students on a faster track inside one classroom. Yet everyone is more scared of hurting someone's feelings than they are of actually making progress. Reading is also a big problem because children aren't being taught how to read, what to look for, and questions to ask. Instead the old standby of classroom management "round robin reading/popcorn reading" takes over and no one learns anything because the students aren't reading for comprehension at that point they are simply watching words.

Kraftster, regarding Virginia specifically, I'm not sure what they're doing. Many states have opted out of NCLB and instead gone for Obama's "Race to the Top." Still involves plenty of testing. I've not seen a breakdown like that before though.

MWB wrote:After researching a little, Virginia is not going to R2T, but instead trying to get a NCLB waiver on their own. The above may be their effort to do so.

Interesting. I think maybe now that you say that, this is what the article I read that talked about this being "based upon historical performance" was getting at. Maybe that's what you need to obtain a waiver.

Don't really know much about the waiver process, but I assume historical performance, tracking of student growth, teacher evaluation, and established state standards all go into it. Virginia also opted not to adopt Common Core Standards, which many states have adopted. Looks like they're trying to do it in their own as much as they can to avoid falling into the R2T or NCLB chasms.

MWB wrote:Don't really know much about the waiver process, but I assume historical performance, tracking of student growth, teacher evaluation, and established state standards all go into it. Virginia also opted not to adopt Common Core Standards, which many states have adopted. Looks like they're trying to do it in their own as much as they can to avoid falling into the R2T or NCLB chasms.

Common Core I feel is a step in the right direction. However in their current state they are not nearly developed enough. Once they are finished it is my belief that every state should adopt them. I feel this way because if every state has the same standards and follows the same path it will help to eliminate the gaps between students of different states. Additionally it will help students that have to move schools and states because everyone will be on the same page. The common core is about the only step in the right direction I feel that has occurred recently.

I tend to agree. We started Common Core this year so it's obviously early, but I like the idea of more depth and less width in the curriculum. I agree with what you say about movement between states too.

They used to, and in a lot of cases they still do, in part. Where I used to teach the administrator evals were a joke. He simply didn't have time to do a thorough one because he was dealing with discipline issues and parents. At my current school it's a different story. Very complete and thoughtful administrator evaluations. Unfortunately, part of my evaluation will now be based on test scores.

Bottom line, people don't trust administrator evaluations or teachers. In some cases that is valid, mostly because of time constraints mentioned above. Also, politicians want to look like they're doing something to "fix" education. "See, I'm holding teachers accountable, just like any other job. And that will make them better teachers."

where I was teaching, my principal was spending so much time with the stuff MWB mentioned as well as with the school board and his higher ups. seriously, every time I would go down to talk to him about one thing or another he was in a meeting with his higher ups. As a new teacher he was to visit and do a formal eval twice a year and to stop by and do walk throughs every other month. He did that for the first few months of me teaching. From there he only did formal evals, and then even my last half year there, he didn't do that. He just had me come down and sign the paperwork that he did do it. It's really a matter of time and money. Maybe instead of the government spending the outrageous amounts of money they do on reform and testing they should just supply the money for every school district to hire a person to do teacher evals, and report to the school principals about their teachers.

count2infinity wrote:where I was teaching, my principal was spending so much time with the stuff MWB mentioned as well as with the school board and his higher ups. seriously, every time I would go down to talk to him about one thing or another he was in a meeting with his higher ups. As a new teacher he was to visit and do a formal eval twice a year and to stop by and do walk throughs every other month. He did that for the first few months of me teaching. From there he only did formal evals, and then even my last half year there, he didn't do that. He just had me come down and sign the paperwork that he did do it. It's really a matter of time and money. Maybe instead of the government spending the outrageous amounts of money they do on reform and testing they should just supply the money for every school district to hire a person to do teacher evals, and report to the school principals about their teachers.

This is what I was really thinking about and figured that made too much sense and/or it wouldn't be perceived as cost effective.I guess it's a lot easier to simply assess test scores and then grandstand in whatever way suits their agenda.

There are about 2,000 Chicago teachers chanting outside my window. No need to ruin my productivity!

Also, I haven't followed it that closely, but the two sides are reportedly close on finances, but the labor stoppage is occurring because Rahm Emanuel wants some form of performance review, while the Union refuses any sort of compensation other than a pure lockstep plan.

looks like the proposed performance reviews are based on test scores. i don't blame the teachers for striking.

a few years ago, one of my wife's colleagues had a class where out of the 20 or so students, more than half were special ed. they tend to cram all of them into one class room so they only have to pay one special ed assistant. yeah...seems fair that she should be paid based on how well a group of kids with learning disabilities do on standardized tests.

count2infinity wrote: Maybe instead of the government spending the outrageous amounts of money they do on reform and testing they should just supply the money for every school district to hire a person to do teacher evals, and report to the school principals about their teachers.

This is what I've been saying for awhile now. It would be a much more reasonable way to evaluate teachers.

I don't think most teachers have a problem being evaluated. It's tying evaluations to student scores that is the issue. One test, one day out of the year, helps determine your worth, and on that one day you can do nothing about it. Yes, you can prepare them all the days leading up to it. However, you've got no control over how much sleep they got, who got yelled at that morning, how doped up mom was that morning, if the kid took his meds, how anxious the kid is, how hard the kid will try that day, or any other myriad of issues. But that one test could make or break you.